I received some new gadgets in the mail today, specifically my USRobotics Internet Phone which will come in handy when I’m traveling. The total cost of the phone was just under $40.00, and  I haven’t tried it yet so can’t tell you anything about the quality of the sound.  The USB Internet phone plugs directly into a computer and using Skype’s service I can make free phone calls through the Internet from anywhere in the world. This is great to have for people that do a lot of traveling, and I’d recommend the Skype service to anyone.  I’m glad to add it to my collection of gadgets I bring with me when I travel!

Donating to EDN yesterday for Earth Day put me in a giving mood, and I remembered coming across a micro-lending site called Kiva.org where normal people like you and me could help finance small loans to needy entrepreneurs located around the world, usually in third-world countries.

I decided to head on over to the site and open an account. After opening up an account I funded it through my Paypal account and made three loans of $25 denominations each to people from Nicaragua, Samoa, and Tajikistan! You can see my profile page here: http://www.kiva.org/lender/TravelingProject. The loans are usually used to help these entrepreneurs start up a new business or make improvements to their existing business.

I think helping people through Kiva fits perfectly with this blog, not to mention it makes me feel good knowing I’m helping less fortunate people. Being an entrepreneur at heart and the focus of this blog being about traveling around the world, I think there’s no better way than to help other entrepreneurs from around the world through a non-profit organization like Kiva! In fact, I think Kiva makes such a perfect fit with this blog that I gave it a permanent section on my sidebar to help promote it to my readers!

Maybe in the future I can travel to see some of these countries, and actually meet the people I have helped face to face; documenting the whole trip to share with readers of this blog! This is something I just might have to really think about and look forward too!

Today, April 22, 2008 is Earth Day 2008!

A brief history: Earth Day was first started in 1970 as a nationwide grassroots demonstration on the environment by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. At a conference in Seattle, Washington the Senator first proposed the nationwide environmental protest to thrust the environment onto the national agenda. On April 22 of that year, 20 million Americans took to the streets to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values; and the movement took off! Fast forward to the present, Earth Day 2007 was one of the largest Earth Days to date, with an estimated billion people participating in Earth Day activities from places all over the world! -Excerts from Wikipedia

As a travel enthusiast, appreciating our planet and concern for keeping the environment as healthy as possible comes naturally. If we don’t start protecting our beautiful planet, many of the sites and places I have the luxury of visiting on my travels around the world won’t be the same or even exist a few decades down the road. This is why I like to celebrate and spread the word about Earth Day! In addition, it is always good to give a little back to mother Earth on this day! This year I decided to make a little donation to Earth Day Network to do my part in protecting the Earth and environment. The screenshot of the Thank You email can be seen below. Although it was only $50 dollars, as this project grows I’ll be making more donations in the future!

My $50 Earth Day Donation Pictured Above

Earth Day Network (EDN) was founded by the organizers of the first Earth Day in 1970 and promotes environmental citizenship and year round progressive action worldwide. Earth Day Network is a driving force steering environmental awareness around the world. Through Earth Day Network, activists connect, interact, and have an impact on their communities, and create positive change in local, national, and global policies. EDN’s international network reaches 174 countries, while the domestic program engages 5,000 groups and over 25,000 educators coordinating millions of community development and environmental protection activities throughout the year. You can check out the Earth Day Network here http://ww2.earthday.net, and I encourage everyone to make a small donation if you can. If your a little short on cash you can still do your part on Earth Day by planting a tree!

If you haven’t heard already, just this month Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines announced they approved a merging which will form the largest airline around the world based on traffic statistics. Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines are the third and fifth largest airlines in the United States. Under the merger arrangements, the new company will be headed by Delta and keep the name “Delta Airlines”. In essence, it seems Delta is taking over Northwest Airlines in this all-stock merger valued at $17.7 billion dollars. The merger still has to be approved by the companies shareholders, as well as go through an antitrust review before the merger becomes final, but I don’t see any reason why the merger would be blocked at this point.

I’m not sure how the merger will affect ticket costs, but since there are still many more major US airlines I doubt it will really have a big impact on the travel industry as a whole when it comes to ticket prices. If you ask me, I think the merger was due to the rising costs of fuel and the current state of the US economy. Just last year both Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines filed bankruptcy, and I think they needed to do this to keep both companies afloat.  If anything, after the merger  I think the new company will be able to offer better services to its client.

I’m such a gadget junky and have gadgets laying all over the place that another piece of equipment I forgot I had was a Sony MiniDV Digital Camcorder pictured above. The Sony DCR-TRV22 is a great digital camcorder with a 2.5″ LCD screen, color viewfinder, 120x digital zoom, and memory stick capability. I’ve owned this camcorder for a few years now, and haven’t used it as much as I should be using it. There’s no better time than now to put the camcorder to use. I think it will be a great addition to my travel equipment, and offer some great multimedia streaming videos of my travel adventures. The big thing on the web nowadays is online videos, so I might as well keep up with the times!

I’ll be adding a section in the “About” page of this blog that lists all my travel equipment with facts about each one since it seems like as this project moves ahead I might end up adding to my collection of wonderful gadgets regularly. I think new readers will be interested to know what type of equipment I use also, and keeping all the information in the “About” page will be much easier than having it scattered around in various blog posts.